high art

This week starts off and ends a little slowly, but Wednesday to Friday ought to be pretty great. Spend your hump-day checking out openings at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Lewis, where a group show and a solo show by painter Megan Marrin, respectively, look to have a much-needed sense of humor. Thursday night Condo New York kicks-off, […]

Now in it’s 12th year, NADA Miami Beach is still full of surprises, even compared to younger satellite fairs. For the first time, NADA is taking place in the storied Fontainebleau hotel. Since 2009, the fair had been located in the nearby Deauville’s quirkier, seemingly grander mid-century ballrooms. Paddy had mixed feelings about that context, but I find myself missing it. The Fontainebleau’s more recently-renovated spaces feel a little more generic and paradoxically fancier but less glamorous. The ceiling is lower, there’s no sweeping ocean view from the booths, and visitors must now pay a $20 admission fee. This iteration of NADA is only slightly geographically closer to the convention center, but significantly less far-off from Art Basel proper in spirit.

But while we were disappointed by Basel’s predictability and lack of variety, NADA 2015 is wonderfully inconsistent. NADA’s exhibitors seem to have grown out of a collective trend-invested “cool kid” adolescence and matured into thoughtfully idiosyncratic connoisseurship. Gone are the days of interchangeable booths with matching pastel-and-neon abstractions—here there’s a greater diversity of good work than we’ve witnessed at art fairs recently. Part of this might be attributed to NADA’s shifting demographics: the fair feels less New-York-centric and more international. Many of the booths that impressed us the most were from Germany, Latin America, or Japan.

This week in Massive Links: GIFs now high brow according to the Atlantic! Also, the magazine does us the favor of locating all the bad public art in the country. Was this really necessary? Dealer and Entrepreneur Jen Bekman waxes on art as does star curator and non-profit director Dan Cameron. Contrary to 20×200 business model, Kevin Kelly thinks sharing will eventually trump ownership in the cloud.